I was interviewed for this Times Higher article about the death of academic Twitter:
Mark Carrigan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester’s Institute for Education, said this might result in a “retrenchment into existing networks”, which would be most keenly felt by early career researchers. “Finding your research community is a crucial part of getting established in academia and [without Twitter] that is inherently a lot harder than it used to be and will become a lot harder still,” he said.
Twitter also arguably contributed to the internationalisation of higher education in recent years, Dr Carrigan added, and its decline might lead to boundaries becoming more pronounced again.
“Twitter, for all its many flaws, did serve basically positive purposes for the academy for quite some time and I can’t see how to recreate that,” he said.
Twitter’s ability to help academics organise has perhaps most keenly been seen in disputes over working conditions and in the way it has been used to call out wrongdoing by senior leaders.
In the UK, Dr Carrigan said, its role in the current pay dispute might have worked against the University and College Union (UCU) because employers could see “in real time” divisions within the union playing out.
But during previous campaigns, such as the strike action that opposed cuts to pensions provided by the Universities Superannuation Scheme, Twitter had been an “extremely positive factor”, he said, and had helped academics focus on a common objective and coordinate with a sense of “we are doing this together”.
Mark Carrigan 